


Just Another Way We Grieve

by Chash



Series: The Morning Seems Impossible [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Season/Series 04 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 15:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13034265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: Madi's had so many dead in her life, she feels like she knows how to deal with death. Like an old pro.It's life she's not used to.





	Just Another Way We Grieve

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for [lackingstealth](http://lackingstealth.tumblr.com/) and [kultiras](http://kultiras.tumblr.com/)!

Madi doesn’t think much about the time before Praimfaya.

When she first met Clarke, she thought she should, because Clarke hung onto it so fiercely. Clarke had lost more people than Madi had ever really known, but she wasn’t just letting them go.

“Should I talk to my parents, like you talk to Bellamy?” she remembers asking one morning.

Clarke frowned, confused. “To your parents?”

“Yeah. So I won’t forget them.”

Clarke knelt down, bringing herself to Madi's level, looking at her in the eye. It was how she tried to make her trust her back then, in those early days, and Madi always found it a little bit funny. Clarke's never really been good with kids.

"If it makes you feel better to talk to them, then you should," she said.

"It makes you feel better talking to Bellamy?"

Clarke's mouth twisted, a little, like she didn't even know she was doing it. "It makes me feel better to think he might hear me," was what she said, and Madi understood that.

But nothing she had before Praimfaya remains, so she leaves her dead for dead and moves on.

She's not even jealous, when Clarke's dead  _do_  come back to her. After all, Clarke always knew they might. And, as she promised, they  _do_  all love her, and it is a little bit like having a family again, a real one, the kind she had before--

The kind she doesn't think about.

But she's never had a little sibling before, and for some reason, that feels  _worse_  than forgetting people. Like she's doing something unforgivable.

Echo's the person to ask about that, she decides. Bellamy is the expert on families, but Echo is probably the expert on leaving people behind. Once she went to the sky instead of into the ground, she stopped being Azgeda; Madi can relate to that.

"Can I talk to you?" she asks, and Echo looks somewhat alarmed.

She knows that she and Echo aren't really that close, not like she's close to Clarke and Bellamy, or even like she's close to Raven and Monty and Harper. Echo isn't really close with people like that, and sometimes, Madi thinks that would be nice.

Not most of the time.

But she's still a part of Madi's family, so once the confusion has passed, she says, "Of course. What is it?"

"Do you ever feel bad?"

Her face clouds. "Are you sick? Do you need?"

"No, not  _sick_. Bad about--I don't know. For not talking to the other Azgeda. For being Skaikru now."

"Oh, that," she says. her tone dismissive. "I was no longer Azgeda before I took to the sky. I wouldn't have gone, if I was Azgeda. I became something new."

It makes sense, whens she thinks about it, but as an answer to her question, it is a little bit frustrating. "And you don't feel bad about it?" she presses. "You don't--miss them?"

"I can miss them without feeling bad about it."

That hadn't even occurred to her. "But--for not missing them  _more_."

Echo's eyes narrow, and she looks Madi over sharply, as concerned as she was when she thought she might be sick. "This would be easier if you just told me the real problem," she finally says. "It would save some time."

"I feel weird about being a sister. I'm not  _upset_ ," she adds, quick. "I'm really happy for them. And I'm excited about the baby. I  _want_  to be a sister. But it's--it feels like a whole new family. And that's hard."

"Have you talked to Bellamy about this?"

Madi bites back on her smile. "I thought you'd be more helpful," she says, mostly to see the look on her face.

It doesn't disappoint.. "Why?"

"Because you lost everything. And you have something new."

"I think of things very differently than you do," Echo finally says. "You were raised Skaikru, not Azgeda. You don't have values like mine. It's probably a good thing." She exhales, as if the words pain her. "I think your family would be happy for you. I think they'd be glad that you found someone to love you. And you shouldn't feel guilty, that you have a new life without them. They would want you to keep living."

Madi flashes her a grin. "See, I told you you could help."

"Don't make me do it again. Bellamy would tell you the same thing."

"Yeah, but he wouldn't have to think about it. He just--says this stuff."

"Because it's true. I don't always agree with him, but he is usually right."

"If he's right, why don't you agree with him?"

She opens and closes her mouth, finally settling on, "Go bother someone else. I have things to do."

Madi just grins wider.

*

Jake is cute, but Madi's still not sure what to do with him, most of the time. He's just kind of  _there_.

"They get better when they get older," Dad tells her, like he doesn't already love him. He's got the baby in his arms almost all the time, whenever Mom puts him down. It's cute.

She's still getting used to calling them  _Mom_  and Dad, but it's getting easier. It feels right.

"What's wrong with him now?"

Dad frowns. "Nothing's wrong with him. He's perfect. But kids are more exciting when they can talk. Right now he's just--"

"Crying and pooping all the time."

"Sometimes he pees. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Once he can do stuff on his own, he'll be more interesting." He wets his lips, looking at her. "You doing okay?"

"Yeah."

"But really. It's been a pretty hectic few weeks."

"Really. I'm fine, Dad."

Every time she calls him Dad, he ducks his head on this huge smile, and that really is great. But then he says, "Echo said I should check in," which sours her good mood somewhat.

"I was just--I never had a sibling."

"I know. You're good at it so far."

"I don't think my parents would be--I don't think they'd mind that I had new parents. I need new parents. But I don't need a new brother. That's why I feel weird."

Dad nods. "I guess I get that. But, you know, I used to think about what would happen to my sister if I never came back down here. And I wanted her to be happy. If she had a family when I got down here, I wouldn't have minded. She's not replacing me by making new friends, or by having a new family."

"But I don't even think about them. I barely even remember."

"Did you ever talk to Cla--Mom about them?"

"Not much. I wanted to hear about you. You were coming back," she adds, before he can say anything. "It just--it didn't make sense, for me to talk about them."

"It doesn't have to make sense. I know Mom told you stories about people who aren't around anymore. Her dad and Wells and Lexa and Lincoln. Right?"

"Yeah."

"So--tell me about your parents," he says. "The first ones. Jake can't talk yet, we need something else to do."

"I don't remember much."

"That's fine. My dad died when I was little too. I can tell you what I remember, and you can tell me what you remember, okay?"

"Okay," says Madi. "My mom's name was Jana."

"That's a nice name," he says, with a warm smile. "Keep going."

*

Maybe she should have realized that talking about them would be nice. After all, Mom always liked talking about her friends, even when it hurt, so maybe if she'd tried, she would have liked it too. She could have seen that coming, if she thought about it. What she couldn't have predicted, she doesn't think, is that talking about them more makes her  _remember_  more, brings them back to her like she was never expecting.

Which is why she wants to go home.

"Home?" Mom asks.

"Back to where I was born. I don't think it would be too far. And I know it's going to be mostly gone," she adds. "I just want to see if there's anything left. And--if I can even find it. I think it would be nice."

"We could take the rover for a few days," Dad says, like he's doing calculations in his head. "Your mom would look after Jake."

"I think we'd have a list a mile long of people who would be willing to look after Jake." Mom smiles. "I guess this is what peace actually means, huh? There's no reason we can't just take a road trip."

"You don't mind?" Madi asks.

Mom hugs her around the shoulders. "I don't mind. I want to see too."

It takes about a week for them to get ready, and that feels like a strange kind of luxury too. Before, when it was just her and Mom, they had all the time in the world, but that wasn't the same, really. They didn't have to check in with anyone, they didn't have Jake to worry about. No one was drawing them a map to the place where she would have grown up, because Mom didn't know where that was any better than Madi did.

Now, though, they can't just leave, and they can't just stay away for as long as they want to. Maybe that's a part of peace too: moving, but having somewhere to come home to.

Madi is a little nervous that it's going to feel like stepping back, that being in the rover again will give her nightmares about the time before Earth was safe again, when she wasn't sure she'd see anyone else ever again.

But it's not the same at all, not with Dad driving while Mom checks the map, the two of them bickering over the right way to go. It doesn't feel like before, when everything was hopeless and barren, even when they get out of the green and into the wastelands. This might not be land they can use anymore, but maybe someday, it can come back.

"Fuck," Dad mutters, and she remembers he hasn't actually been out here before.

"Language," she says, just because she knows he tries to remember not to swear in front of her. "It's not as bad as it looks."

"Not as bad how?" he asks.

"It's not trying to kill us," says Mom.

"Wow, yeah. What a ringing endorsement."

"We don't have to go," Madi says, soft, and Dad glances back over his shoulder at her. "If it's too--"

"Hey, no, that's not what I meant," he says, with a soft smile. "Just--I can't imagine what it was like for you guys, being down here alone for six years."

"We mostly stayed in the green part," Madi says.

"There is some decent salvage out here. And like Madi said, it's not as bad as it looks. There's more water than I expected. Even some animals." She shrugs. "I don't think we could live out here, but it's not--I think we could get it back. I think we can expand someday."

"Yeah," says Dad, absent. "It's just--so much barren land."

He seems to feel better once they're out of the rover for the night, when he can actually look around. Driving by, it looks like undifferentiated brown death, but once they're looking around, Dad can see the details he missed before, the way things are dead without feeling  _gone_.

"We watched the green part get bigger," Mom tells him, soft. "It's going to take a long time, but the world's going to recover. All of it."

"Good to know we didn't screw it up that badly for the next generation." He puts his arm around Madi, warm and close. "You're going to be okay, right?"

It's dark, and that makes it easy to say, "I don't know."

Mom sits down on her other side, offering her own support. "You don't know?"

"I still don't know how to think about--everything. It's nice to talk about my parents, to remember, but I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what we're going to do in--a year, or two years, or three years. All we talked about for so long was people coming home and the bunker opening up, and now that's all done, and we have to have a  _life_."

"We don't have to," Mom says. Her voice is so gentle it almost hurts. "We get to, okay? I know it feels like a lot, but--" Madi can feel her move, is sure that she and Dad are looking at each other over her head. "This is how it's supposed to be. Us moving ahead. And we can figure out what you want to do in a year or two years or ten years, if you want."

"But why us?" she asks. "Why do we get to have futures and no one else did. Why are we--"

Dad wraps his arms all the way around her, pulling her close, and she realizes all at once that she's crying, that she doesn't know why or when she started, but she isn't just going to be able to stop. They're real, fat tears, and she thinks she might choke on them.

"Hey," he says. "Hey, I know. It's okay. We're just--you don't get to pick who survives. You can try, but--it's just how it happens, I guess. We were lucky. I'm sorry your parents weren't. I wish we could have saved everyone. I wish everyone could have made it." He rubs her back, making big, soothing circles. “Sometimes I feel so guilty about it. I was so lucky. I shouldn’t have been this lucky.”

“Shouldn’t have?”

“Eight hundred and ten people survived Praimfaya. And I got almost everyone I loved in there.” She can hear him swallow. “I still can’t believe you and Clarke are even here, some days.”

“You didn’t even know about me,” says Madi.

“Yeah, that just makes it even more unbelievable. I came back down here and had a whole family just waiting for me. I’ve been so fucking lucky.”

“We earned a little luck,” says Mom.

“Plenty of people who have earned luck don’t get it.” He squeezes her again. “We’re alive because we are, Madi. That’s it, that’s the whole reason. We fought for it and won. And now we get to decide what to do.”

“I want to be a good sister,” she says. “I want to be happy.”

Mom kisses her hair. “That sounds like a good place to start.”

*

It takes a few days to make it back to her old village, but they aren’t bad days. They drive a little more slowly, stopping sometimes at other ruins to see if they can salvage anything. She and Clarke did this before, picking through the remains of old lives, but they were never able to go so far from the clean land before. She thought it might be worse, so far out, but it’s mostly the same everywhere.

It shouldn’t be as comforting as it is, but like Clarke said, this means the world is going to come back. It’s going to fix itself, slowly but steadily.

She’s going to get to see it get better, too.

It’s mid-afternoon when they start to get close, and Madi surprises herself by recognizing the outskirts of the village.

“I used to climb that tree,” she says, peeking up. It’s cracked and broken, but she recognizes the pattern of branches, low enough for her to pull herself up, even when she was smaller.

“Yeah?” asks Mom. It’s her shift driving, and she slows down as they pass it. “Do you want to stop?”

It's on the tip of her tongue to say no, automatic, but she realizes she does. “Can we? I want to walk from here.”

It's not as if there's an actual road they're driving on that they need to pull off, or any other people likely to come by, but Mom still finds somewhere out-of-the way to leave the rover. Dad gets the supplies and checks to make sure it's safe, even though it's  _always_  safe out here, even though there isn't anything to hurt them but dead trees.

Once he lets them out, Madi feels almost overwhelmed by the sight of it. Most of the buildings didn't survive intact, but she knows them, in some strange, hazy sense, knows that this house was just being finished when they were told to leave for the Conclave, that this house had a pair of twins about her age she used to play with.

This is her home. She wasn't even sure she'd know it at all, and now here she is, flooded with recognition, staggering with it.

Mom puts her arm around her shoulders. "Are you okay?"

"This is it," she says. "Do you want to see?"

It's not a very good tour, made up of half remembrances and questions, statements that start with, "I think this was" and "this might have been," but it's not as if Mom and Dad mind. They never spent much time in villages like this before, didn't really have time to just explore, and they like seeing what the settlement looks like and how it was laid out.

"This was my house," she says, when they make it there, and she's sure of that. She knows this place.

It hasn't been hit as hard as some of the houses have, most of the walls still standing and the yard recognizable. The swing in the tree is even still hanging.

"Do you think it still works?" she asks.

Dad tests it with his hand, putting weight on it until he's content it won't fall. "Should be fine. You want to try it out?"

Madi hops up, and Mom pushes her, and it doesn't feel like her parents would be upset about this. She thinks they'd be happy, that she was home, that the swing still worked, and that Madi still likes it.

"We could probably make one of these at home," Dad muses, looking at the tree. "Maybe a whole playground. We've already got plenty of kids, and we're only going to have more."

"Us personally or as a group?" Mom asks.

"I was thinking as a group. But probably us personally too. Right?"

"Let's see how we do with the two we have first," she says, but she's smiling, and Madi's pretty sure she's going to have at least one more sibling.

It's going to be nice.

"Okay," she says, letting out a breath. "Let's go inside."

There really isn't much to the house, which she knew. In her memories, it was a small, warm place, full of love, and it's strange and cold to see it like this, but--the signs are still there.

"This is nice," says Mom, like she's thinking the same thing. "I wish I could have met your parents."

They probably would have been at war, if they met before. Madi knows how it was; if not for Praimfaya, she and Clarke wouldn't have been allies, let alone family.

It's still a nice thought.

"Me too," she says. "This was their room."

They go to her room last, because Madi's so afraid of not recognizing herself in it, but as it turns out, she didn't have to worry, because as soon as they go in, all their attention is drawn to the ruined bed, which is full of cats.

"We always used to have a lot around," she says, slow, while her brain is still trying to catch up. She hasn't even  _seen_  a cat since Praimfaya. "To keep the rats away from the food."

"I guess if dogs made it, cats could too," says Mom. "How old do you think the kittens are?"

Madi takes another look,  _really_  looks, and realizes Mom is right. It's not just cats, it's a mother cat and a group of kittens, small, mewling things, eyes barely open.

Dad is frowning. "Pretty young. The mother looks thin."

"Six years since domestication," says Mom. "Do you think they remember people?"

"Only one way to find out." He offers his hand to the mother cat, and she sniffs it, delicate, and then bumps her head against his fingers. He smiles, scratches her behind the ears, and Madi can hear her starting to purr.

"Good thing we came back," Mom says. "I don't know if she would have made it much longer, with this many kittens to feed."

Dad smiles. "So, now we're going to have kittens?"

"You weren't honestly just going to leave them here, were you?" Mom asks, and he rubs the back of his neck.

"I never said that. Just making sure that we're all on the same page here. We're planning to lure a bunch of cats into the back of our car to take them home."

"That's exactly what we're planning, yes," says Mom. "Want to go get the rover?"

He leans down to peck her on the mouth. "Be nice to the cats while I'm gone."

"We'll start working on luring them."

Madi sits down on the ruins of her old bed, far enough from the cats that she hopes they won't be upset. The mother cat looks at her with one bright green eye, wary but not yet threatened, and Mom sits on Madi's other side, giving them more room.

"How are you feeling?" Mom asks.

"I don't miss it here," she says. "It's nice, but--Echo said something about how you can miss people without feeling bad about it, and I guess that's what this is like. This was--I was happy here, but I don't want to go back. And that's probably an okay way to feel."

"It's a good way to feel. We understand, okay? We've all lost a lot of people, and sometimes--" She sighs. "I used to think all the time about what I could have done differently, how I could have saved this person, how I could have made better choices. But--these are the choices I made, and this is the life I have. So if I'm happier now than I was six years ago, that's a good thing. Because even if I wasn't, I couldn't go back."

Madi reaches over to the cat, who still seems more than happy to accept their affection. Her fur is a little gritty, but soft and warm, and she has  _six_  kittens, which is a lot of kittens. They could keep two and still have plenty to share. Raven could use a kitten, and Monty and Nate too. Probably not Murphy and Emori. Harper would like one or two. Grandma and granddad might.

They can figure it out.

"Yeah," says Madi. "I'm glad we came here. I'm happy I saw it. But--this isn't home."

"No." Mom kisses her hair. "So let's pick up the cats and get back."

*

"You know which one you want yet?" Dad asks. They found an old, mostly intact basket and lined it with one of their own blankets, and Dad wrapped his arms in cloth to move the cats into it. The mother was weak enough she didn't protest, and Madi has been feeding her scraps of meat as they drive, trying to gain her trust. She seems pretty starved for affection, maybe even just for company. There must have been another cat around to make the kittens, but they couldn't find any sign of him. Maybe he ran out of food or left to find a better place to live.

She hopes wherever he is, he's alive, and safe.

"How many can I have?"

Dad snorts. "How many do you want?"

"I don't know. I want the mom, for sure. And maybe--two kittens?"

"Three cats and a baby is a lot," says Mom, frowning. "Especially kittens. They take work."

"We're probably going to have to keep all of them for a while," Dad says. "Until they're old enough to eat solid food."

Mom at least sounds fond and amused when she asks, "We're going to end up with a lot of cats, aren't we?"

"I think a maximum of three is a good rule. But we have some time to pick the best ones."

"They're all the best ones," says Madi, loyal. The mother cat purrs like she's agreeing. "What's Latin for  _peace_?"

"Uh, Pax, I think," Dad says. Mom found some books while he was in space, saved them for him the whole time he was gone, and now he's been teaching himself.

Madi frowns. "That's not a great name."

"Irene is from the Greek, I think. I know it means peace in some language."

"Irene," she repeats, looking down at the mother cat. "I think she looks like an Irene."

"Me too," says Mom. "And you know, she's going to need taking care of for the next few years. All of them are. We need to make sure they grow up right. Do you think you can do that?"

It's not a  _future_ , not really. Not all of one, all by itself.

But it's a good place to start.

"Yeah," she says. "I think I can."


End file.
